azanar

The bond of family is unlike any other bond.

You don't need a marriage to have a family; if you disagree with this, I worry you are getting concepts and titles knotted to tightly with one another.

Family as a concept has a clear, practical value; this much I will totally agree with. I don't think it is as important the shape that family makes, though, and thus far marriage has only lent legitimacy to certain forms of family -- one man, one woman, largely responsible for the welfare of the offspring they produce. I can think of a lot of ways in which this is suboptimal.

But marriage having clear, practical value? It seems the practical value you call out in marriage is that it acts as a sort of moralistic glue to hold a marriage together when other means of adhesion -- trust of one another, emotional support, physical attraction, etc -- have fallen by the wayside. If this need to not fail against some societal title bestowed upon a couple is all that is left holding them together, why is this good? How does "'till death do us part" help when it is more of a constraint and/or threat than a promise? And if the couple already has a sufficient number of these things gluing them together, why do we need this additional social glue?

So I'd like to see what marriage is meant to represent separated from the actual institution, and considered separately. If a couple has what a marriage represents, but lacks the title, I don't see how this is worth distinguishing -- or a union in general for that matter; I think single man/woman couples are more of a historical accident than anything. If a couple has the title of marriage, but has a substantive lack of what a marriage represents, I don't see how the title is going to make either of their lives better. It only makes them feel guilty for not living up to what they labeled themselves as, and I've never seen the benefit in that.

I am married, and there are few things that mean less to my and my wife's relationship than that title. It isn't the glue that bonds us, and it would not be the glue that would keep us together if everything else fell apart. But enough other people think it is that we found not being married a huge inconvenience; society in general, and the government in particular, are heavily tilted toward engineering couples into marriage. We'd have been happy remaining unmarried the rest of our lives if everything weren't so constructed to engineer us into wedlock, but we also didn't want to be so financially penalized for not behaving.

So we're married, but there are few things that mean less to us; we were married in all practical purposes before we had the title. Getting the title was strictly pragmatic. If this is part of what is tearing marriage apart, so be it; perhaps it would be better if the institutions that stood so much on ceremony faded into insignificance, and we started focusing more on the things those ceremonies are meant to cement.

They should be angry, but at themselves. They were marketed an image of a perfect, prosperous future, and then acted all appalled when the realization came up somewhat short of the Dream. The American Dream you speak of is an ideal, but is nowhere near an entitlement, and certainly nothing other people are under the obligation to guarantee for those who didn't get theirs. On average, you will end up better than your parents through hard work and diligence; but shit does happen, and our attempts to counteract that are arbitrary at best. We can't make the world fair; developing an antagonistic attitude, and expecting payment for a broken marketing-slogan-turned-assumed-promise, threatens to drag everyone down. Which of these is more fair, I wonder?

I see a lot of complaining about my position in your comment but I'm not seeing what you say the root cause is... I'd like to hear that.

I'm not certain what the root cause is, to be honest. You have the tone of someone who feels severely cheated, and with a desire to take it to those whom you feel cheated you. You have certain expectations of the way things ought to be, and seem convinced to at least a certain degree that there is a group behind the curtain manipulating things such that your expectations don't come to pass.

In the words of the late Eric Naggum: if this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.

You claim one of your prior employers didn't want to invest in your well-being or professional development in any way. Do you feel employers ought to do these sorts of things, and not just as perks to entice you to work there? Would you leave an employer that didn't for one that did? Is this not an option for people in general? Or do you believe that people are trapped in whatever jobs they land, and that, as a result, we can't reasonably make them responsible for their own professional well-being?

As for chasing young people away, they're chasing themselves away.

Not from what I've been able to gather from the youngsters I work with. They're scared shitless of the fire-and-brimstone accounts told to them by people who have spent the last thirty years cataloging every moment they've felt screwed, and counter-balancing that with an empty catalog of anything good. It leaves me with a lot of work to do, to be honest, because they are honestly as drawn to the profession from a standpoint of personal interest as I am, but they can't help but think that living as a fry cook at McDonalds might be a better way to go. I think this is a shame; I can't help but think you believe this is anything but.

I think this is actually the most important skill one develops by constantly reading up and playing with new technologies and languages. Just as mathematics is as much about learning to reason about things as it is about the particular theorems you prove, learning about technologies and languages and ideas is constant exercise for your brain to absorb new models and reconcile them with ones it has already internalized. Discarding old ones isn't a big deal, because you've been doing that almost continuously anyway. But, like everything else in this discussion, it requires a certain amount of willpower and ability not to take one's own comfortable position for granted.

Like you, I think they are perfectly capable; the problem is motivation. The longer someone has been doing something, the more it becomes a comfortable habit. Not just in economic skillsets, but in most everything, people will rabidly defend comfortable habits, to the point of declaring that society should be forced into steady state if that is what will keep them comfortable. Every human interest story we hear of someone who saw their industry vanish out from underneath them, and then they indignantly plant their feet and declare that we must bring their industry back is an example of this.

We become resistant to change, but I do not really believe this is an inevitability of age; I think it is something that we societally accept from older people far more than we do from young people. They've worked hard their whole lives, they deserve us subsidizing the comfort they now deserve as a result. Young people haven't worked hard for long enough yet, and so they not only don't deserve comfort, but we should steal away the comfort they do have to pass to the older generation that has earned their stripes.

Accusations fly in all directions, each group screaming to the other that they are the entitled ones, and that all this group wants is fairness and consideration. It's ridiculous; they are all caught up in a sense of entitlement, and all participate in an economic system that fundamentally doesn't care what they think they deserve. No matter who you are, you will never get what you think you deserve; best leave this sense of deservedness at the door, and realize there is a large random component to all of life's happenings.

You might not deserve, in some existential sense, to lose ten straight poker games holding a flush or better, but the worst thing to do if you do is get indignant and either declare the game is rigged, or try to rig it yourself.

So, agree with Vivtek; people in their 30s are more than capable of learning new things. But capability is orthogonal to willingness, and along that vector I think we have a lot of motivating to do.

Here's an alternate perspective on all of this:

There is an underlying cause for that elephant in the room you alude to. The people who find themselves at dead end jobs in their 30's and 40's are not just hapless victims of the system. Some of them started out with a bitter, jaded perspective about their profession and employment, and decided that they'd be stupid to provide anything more than a minimum-effort meeting of requirements. Maybe that would be stupid, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater; they didn't just stagnate in their role, they stagnating in their entire profession. The world did not stand still just because they declared that everything is shit, and all the technological advancement in the world doesn't change that fact. Their job is at a dead end because they themselves are at a dead end.

It does not have to be that way, but the solution is not to prematurely jade the next generation as a means to artificially level the playing field. You complain that the next generation who is willing to work for cheap and demand little in exchange for sacrificing their souls are damaging the industry. That may be, but suggesting they either have to get bitter or get out trades damage for damage. The problem is that these people don't really know the value they'll produce at the organizations they work at, and as a result sell themselves short. Becoming bitter about this only solidifies that stance; you still believe you are in a bad bargaining position, except now you are indignant about it. That doesn't help. You make them feel like they are worthless cogs, and then are surprised when they accept shit wages and shit benefits as a result. This is what a worthless cog does. They are only becoming what you and the rest of the indignent, experienced professional community believe they are, so don't get so pissed off when they undersell you as a result and make things shit for everyone.

Yeah, I'm kind of annoyed with the situation in the CS world as well, but with a very different perspective on causes. I think the typical party line of "screw the management, and the young whipper-snappers who deserve this less than us" is a completely screwed up sentiment. This problem is not going to be solved by chasing all of the youngsters away, and making sweeping generalizations about how everything sucks and we should all simultaneously not put up with anything and accept that we are powerless tools at the bidding of our employers racist and classist impulses.

This does not help, unless your goal is just to make people in our industry angry and hate one another.

I think the entire culture is aimed at a much broader motivation than that. It is aimed at a culture of intense intellectual curiosity, which makes the community self-selecting in meritocratic way.

This carries into startups as well, because they are as much about what you can learn as what you can do. Presumably, most startups are exploring at least some uncharted territory. How curious you are about that territory will suggest how much you can learn from it, and what you can learn from it will certainly have an effect on how well you execute.

As a result, startups end up as one of the primary focusses of the culture, but I think this as much a byproduct as it is an end to itself.

But then again, if I'm willing to make exceptions, that puts me on the slippery slope: where, exactly, do I draw the line?

You won't know until later where the line ought to be, which makes it tricky to draw one ahead of time. I worry though, not because of the morality of your actions, but because of the moral hazard they generate. You allow them to graft your abilities onto themselves, and they are put into a position where they are expected to have those abilities themselves. This is scary, because incompetence doesn't just cause damage in catastrophic, discrete instances, such as a building falling down or a bridge failing. The damage of continuous incompetence multiplying on itself can be just as catastrophic in the end. Bare in mind, our present financial catastrophe was not the result of a single isolated incident of incompetence; it took thousands of incompetent people and the better part of a decade.

So, what are our metrics. As a few examples:

1. The graduation rate of the student body. 2. Standardized test scores. 3. Rates of subsequent employment after graduation. 4. Salary of subsequent employment. 5. The relative prestige of the employing companies.

What we are measuring here is the rate by which people default, and with the expressed goal that we maximize these. What we actually want to end up maximizing is a meta-level or two up from these metrics, but what we've come up with so far is measuring a set of consequences that might kind of indicate that we are maximizing what we actually want. Of course, we forget that these implications only go one way. What we may end up maximizing might have the same symptoms as our goal.

The other question really becomes how you develop a metric to gauge "curiosity". It's really quite subjective, but it is something we would have to do if we'd want to maximize it to any appreciable degree.

Here's my thoughts about this. In the large, it just isn't possible. Psychological motivation is not a multiple-choice test. In order to know someone is curious, you have to expose them to situations that will bring that sort of curiosity out. What you'd need to do is observe and interact with someone, and gauge their reaction to stimuli that would bring about curiosity.

But even then, once you start measuring it, how do you maximize it within a collective? Is it even possible to change the frame of mind of a collective of people? There are 25 of them with a frame of mind they come into the school system with from their parents, and there is one of you telling them that their collective sense of reality isn't the only perspective available. False consciousness is hard enough to overcome one-on-one.

I really think it has to be a grassroots process, if it is going to work at all. You need to convince your friends who don't already believe it that it is worth having faith in continuous learning as a net benefit to one's life. Then they can pass this frame of mind down to their children, who will hopefully become numerous enough eventually that the positive feedback loop starts.

How to do that is left as an exercise to the reader; I've made a difference in the perspectives of a few people, but I have no idea which argument or combination of arguments I made worked. I don't think I could know, to be honest.

As for the system encouraging people to get a job, it is just responding to popular sentiment. The gauge people use for evaluating any educational system, public or private, is the number of people who move along to the next step of a pre-determined timeline. If you are in secondary school, you move on to college; if you are in college, you move on to employment. It's not that the schools want people to not learn, it's that the people who rely on the schools don't care if the schools foster this attitude. It's not that we are actively trained to be beholden to the executives of society; it's that we apathetically punt to them, because we just don't give enough of a damn, or believe that it is worth giving a damn. You have to believe something is worth caring about before you will expend energy to care about. It just isn't that important to us, as a general population, because we believe it won't make a fucking difference anyway. So we punt, and so do the schools.

I daresay that the sense of accomplishment from solving a problem or truly learning something is a universal human response.

It may be, but never underestimate the power of socialization in general upon any sort of universal human response. There are so many things we have elevated to the level of faux pas; is it really such a stretch to believe that demonstrated learning could not be elevated to the same level?

It is easy to cast aspersion at the system, but it is worth digging several levels of implication deep, and seeing how much of the system is just a reflection of ourselves.

There is a certain degree of faith needed to want to make progress toward some distant and difficult goal. If you don't believe the rewards are going to be there when you complete the journey, there is really no point in even starting down.

The two rewards I can immediately think of with respect to learning are: the ability to approach the problems you find in life with a deeper and more enlightened understanding, and as a result are in a better position to generate a lot of value for humanity; and the feeling of satisfaction from having gained understanding into something that isn't trivial. You have to believe one or both of these things will happen before you start, otherwise you'd being doing something difficult for no reason at all.

The reason why it seems beyond my comprehension, and perhaps the reason why it feels beyond your comprehension as well, is that there are people who don't believe this. They think that there is no sense of enlightenment at the end of learning, or that this sense of enlightenment isn't worth the effort. They think that whatever they end up learning will be of no practical value, and that it is only practical things that hold value to people in general.

They believe, quite honestly, that learning will get them right back to where they are now, except for the practical value of the sheet of paper they receive at the end.

In short, I think people, if they ever had it, have lost the faith. It doesn't matter what you learn, so you should make the process of running in circles on as flat a plot of ground as possible.

The difference, at least for me, is that I haven't yet lost the faith. I see value in learning, both in an intrinsic sense of accomplishment, and a societal effect of being able to make a bigger impact on things people use. The positive feedback loop is there now; unfortunately, it has been with me for so long, I can't actually recall what got it started.

If the positive feedback loop doesn't start though, the lack of it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You end up in social groups where learning is discouraged, and where things that are practical now are much more valued. Once you fall in with the social group that fits your point of view, it takes quite a revelation to reach escape velocity from the same.

So, this comes down to yet another question, which I still don't know the answer to: how do you motivate people to take an example as part of a more fundamental truth, rather than an exception that proves their point of view? I wonder if it involves forcefully weaning them from the teat they've discovered the more intelligent amongst us are willing to provide and for far less of a cost than the value people get out of it.

I really wonder, as I did in another comment on this article, how much of this is really a product of past behaviors of those of us who love to learn. It seems as though we thought positive reinforcement is the answer; maybe we should revisit that.

And you certainly did your part in helping the world that direction.

You were willing to undersell yourself in allowing people to pass off your work and knowledge and skills as your own, and then you wonder why everyone around you seems to be so amazingly stupid. They're stupid because you provided them absolutely no incentive not to be. You made ignorance cheap, and as a result, it is precisely what you got.

There must've been some incentive for you, I presume. It probably wasn't the money, because you already said your fee was small. It wasn't the desire to wise these people up, because there was nothing for them to do once you were done. Why did you do this? I certainly hope it wasn't just for the sake of walking around smug amongst the uneducated masses, because then you are damning a monster you helped create.

You're not the only generation Xer I've conversed with. I'm right on the cusp between that generation and the next, so I know a number of people from both; it's an interesting place to be for perspective.

And yes, the other generation Xers say these same thing. They were more humble; they were less entitled; they dealt with pain we never had to, and it made them better. I don't think I can say what I want less strongly, so forgive the profanity when I do say it: fuck that noise. With this sort of line of arguing, there is nowhere we can go, because the whole thing has decayed into a battle of generation identity. Reason has exited the building, because you have a vested interest in preserving your sense of superiority in your own identity. At what point could any of us convince you to rethink that? If you say never, then you have a sense of entitlement brought about by your generational brand. You don't get a pass for that any more than the author here gets for his sense of entitlement to some form of employment.

It's ridiculous: I'm supposed to pay more attention to your thoughts, simply because you felt forced into certain sacrifices. How about I pay more attention to your thoughts because they seem more right, and we yank generation identity out of this?

There are a few tidbits I pulled out of the conversation that I think would be interesting to discuss apart from the context of self-entitlement, but I worry they're going to get drowned out in the noise. We're too busy beating down someone else, ostensibly because we think they need to be brought down a peg, but then we say shit like this that is so logically fallacious that it makes this whole thread seem not for the purest of ends. I was with you when you made your first reply above; now I'm not so sure.

This is going to ruin your world view, so brace yourself

So, this is ridiculously tongue-in-cheek, and the reply is over-the-top to the degree that I can imagine with no effort the same being uttered from underneath a drill sergeant's hat against some fresh recruit who copped a serious attitude.

It's not an unfair response to brash cockiness, but it has set me thinking.

Whether a language, or a framework, or a library, or any other handy tool of the software trade, there seems to be two camps that drown everyone else out in the din.

There's the camp that declares that learning new things is a matter of extrapolating from the understanding one has already developed to fit with whatever assumptions this instantiation of thing X makes. For instance, you understand what Object Oriented programming is, and how it works. You are presented with a language you have never used before, but know it has support for OO. This puts you from a level of having to understand OO to a level of understanding this language's semantics for OO.

Then there's the camp that declares that learning new things always starts from a position of absolute ignorance. Prior knowledge and understanding of concepts that would seem to apply to this new thing you are learning don't apply, almost as an axiom. As with my example of OO above, it doesn't matter that you know what OO is, and what it means to the structure of your program. If you don't know OO in the language of discussion, you get no points toward credit of understanding OO.

If I may be blunt, both these stances seem like bullshit. You don't magically know the syntax of how to do OO in a new language simply because you know OO from a theoretical level; it's something you have to look up. But different languages' implementation of OO aren't so disparate that the only thing they share is the name. There is a basis there you can rely on, but it doesn't get you 100% of the way there.

I guess the question I don't think people answer enough, which I would like to inject into the conversation is "how far does it get you?"

I realize that the answer will vary for different theoretical ideas, and different practical realizations of the same. The point of my question is to challenge the presumption that understanding of related concepts either gets you to the finish by default, or leaves you gasping at the starting along with the people who didn't have that understanding. I think this gets left behind when we start having all of these political battles based on generational identity, and I'd like to see what people think when smacking other generations around isn't the primary goal of a thread.

That is, unless they interview at an organization that is much more interested in finding compatible personality for their culture than they are in the person's ability. These organizations exist; I worked for one a year or two back. The candidate I was interviewing as part of a panel had not been asked a coding question to that point, and she was already quite far along in the interview process -- the next step after the panel interview was an offer. No one else really cared; they just wanted someone who would increase headcount while not disrupting the culture and structure of the organization.

So, the people who answer this way, they're just playing a numbers game. They keep going on interviews until they hit an organization like I describe above; at that point, all they need to be hired is to just be agreeable.

It's not even that. His assertion seems to be that practice outside of a sufficiently business-like environment doesn't count, because you won't be compelled to focus all of your time and energy on just those things that bring a positive change in rate of value production now. It's a dangerous game to play, but a desirable one moment-to-moment in an environment that severely dislikes disruptive ideas -- the thing that learning for something other than instant gratification is bound to cause.

This is the real problem then, isn't it.

External pressure is not the only thing that can exert the necessary motivation to learn new things. But the crux of his argument seems to be that you have to have these external motivators, otherwise you'll never be any good at what you are learning.

I suppose the argument could be made that if you don't have external pressures, you won't learn whatever you are studying well enough. This argument seems specious to me. I've heard plenty of stories which validates against my own more limited experience with people who are motivated to learning by extrinsic motivations; on the level, they just aren't as good, because the extrinsic motivation ends the instant you can convince someone else you are good enough. From there, you only have to convince yourself you are good enough, and the thresholds for this vary a lot. Having the intrinsic motivation to go beyond what others expect I could only see having an additive effect on one's ability.

Or perhaps I am just making an attempt to validate my own intrinsic motivation to learn stuff in spite of a relative absence of external pressure. I can't help but think this author is attempting to validate the converse of that.

Or maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe if I want a position at a bank being held to this sort of standard, then I don't really have to worry about teaching myself new things and I can survive without a motivation above and beyond getting paid. I don't know that I'd be so sycophantic toward that culture, though, if that is all that is expected of me. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to write an article claiming it is a waste of my time.

One other point:

First of all, banks are always a good indicator of the position’s value in business terms.

How true is this? He seems to take the stance that banks are pretty much infallible when it comes to assigning proper value to individuals; the folklore I am exposed to here and elsewhere suggests this isn't anywhere near true.

It seems rather odd, also, that he asserts that banks will fire people who have even short-term decreases in added value. This seems really foolish; value generation varies over time. I don't understand how organizations with such a intricate grasp of value production could miss this. That is, unless they don't have that grasp he claims they do.

You might be out of a job anyway, even if you decide to go along.

Companies do not fire people just for matters of insubordination, they fire people for budgetary reasons as well. If whatever change is pushed for costs the business millions of dollars because the lowly develop who said it was dangerous was right, that developer is still at risk of being fired.

The only think that might save you is a culture which demands that companies be loyal to their employees at the expense of everything else.

Everwhere else, obsequiousness isn't as safe as everyone thinks.

I just say, "Yes. And this is what it will cost you to do it right"

You have a number of "this is what it will cost you" options which will only work if the party you are negotiating with is reasonable. There are teams and managers out there who will happily assert that they can violate the laws of space-time in order to avoid making the sacrifices you'll tell them they need to make.

Note that "doing it wrong" or "doing it quick & dirty" are not options.

What if you are told directly to do it "quick & dirty," and you refuse? Is that not the same thing as saying "No"? Or by never saying no, do you mean never say no without providing what qualifications would turn it into a yes? What do you do about people you know will attempt to spin things later on to bolster their claims that they weren't advised of the costs ahead of time?

In other words, what do you do about people who don't have an impeccable sense of ethics? It seems like you would need that before you could feel safe being this agreeable.

I'd say it is more realistic in other places than it is in Japan and similar social cultures.

The limiting component is one's sense of honor and loyalty to one's company. In a culture where honor iand loyalty sn't so prized, a manager would have no problem firing an employee in an attempt to deceive people.

Sure, it might blow the deadline, and everyone will know that, but it will shelter the manager from responsibility. If the manager can intimidate the engineer into accepting the new feature on the old deadline, then the manager can claim it is the engineers fault for blowing the deadline. If the manager can't intimidate the engineer, and instead fires him, he can claim he would have hit the deadline if he didn't have such an incompetent staff underneath him. Either way, it's not his fault. Sure, it might screw the company, and it will definitely screw the engineer, but at least the manager is safe.

And yes, there are a lot of organizations like this where responsibility does not follow authority. But it requires a complete disregard for one's sense of honor.

From the conversations I've had with my dad regarding Japanese culture -- he was stationed there while serving in the military --, I get the impression this sort of dishonorable behavior is almost inconceivable over there. That might be why it seems so unrealistic to you. :-\

There's a difference between the two examples in your metaphor which is extremely important.

In the case of the sales guy in the kitchen shop, he already had a known set of things to arrange with a known set of prices and a known set of discounts that he could work against. This is a lot of knowns, and very little estimation.

Now imagine that instead of having a known set of things, he offered to have built for you a set of kitchen supplies to match what you thought you might be making in your kitchen in the foreseeable future. The supplies you need may or may not already exists in the market of kitchen supplies.

For the supplies that already exist, estimation is pretty easy and accurate. Look at the price tags, and sum them, possibly picking out subsets in the process.

For the supplies that don't yet exist, estimation is anywhere from difficult to impossible, depending on the accuracy demanded. There is the time and cost of building the finished product, but there is also the time spent researching what that finished product ought to be, while balancing between the cost of the finished product and its effectiveness.

Software development isn't a matter of taking a set of solutions and finding an optimal set of subset. Software development is determining what that initial set ought to contain; it might contain some already existing subsets, which makes that part of estimation easier. But other elements you will have to create, and estimating creation time of something that doesn't yet exist is often a case in futility. It often simply comes down to a gut feeling, or intuition, or whatever you want to call it.

This is why people get bullied. If someone's gut says something is a particular way, but they are feeling intense peer pressure to believe it isn't that way, they'll feel compelled to distrust their intuition. Imagine, if you will, someone who believes the universe is billions of years old in a community full of people who believe it is only 6000 years old, at a time when people were just starting to discover evidence for this longer period; he'll feel strongly compelled to keep his intuition to himself.

sigh Even this example isn't perfect, because there is still something tangible to it. It's hard to find metaphors that do the nebulous nature of software development justice. Maybe someone else has a better metaphor they've had success with?

It all seems so amazingly childish to me. But I'm not surprised; ask anyone from either party battling it out on the wall, and the response will be about as substantive as "they're such whiny little babies, and I need to cover my ass from their inevitable fuck-ups". So we force on them responsibility in the most condescendingly smarmy way possible, by recognizing and granting weight to their authority while at the same time sneering at it and throwing them binary decisions, as though that was the real problem.

The real problem is culture, not features. Only a small part of the rant the original author wrote was about the features of the product he was developing. A good portion about it was about a culture that didn't give a shit about everything else in code except the features; organization, readability, maintainability, and everything else don't matter. They knew full well that this was not a "throwaway" product based on the objectives they laid out, but used "throwaway" like this magic word that had no prerequisites, and was just a synonym for "finish it faster".

They could've asked for neither feature, and I would bet code would've still sucked, because developing maintainable code is far more difficult than slapping together a roughed-out, buggy first pass. But the culture believed as a tenet that maintainable code was not important; and that belief is probably about as easy to scour out as the outlandish beliefs of political pundits.

Adopting an attitude of defensive compliance would only make the culture within more vulnerable to bullshit like this. The culture was already based on childishness, and behaving like a child would add more validation to the culture. Bare in mind it's not the tone of the defensiveness I am calling childish, it is the content. The template response quoted by patio11 is just as childish, even if you imagine it spoken in a professonal, dignified tone. It deflects responsibility by way of establishing a very polarized power relationship between boss and subordinate, to where those words do not sound at all out of place. It is Bad Agile in spades.[1]

This sort of power relationship makes a lot of very important conversations that need to take place within a software project much more difficult and less likely. These aren't the conversations to do with culling or amending the feature set. They are the conversations to do with trade-offs based on the same feature set; they are matters to which the developers, and not the management, have the most knowledge and insight. But they can't happen when people believe that important decisions happen only certain places within an organization.

It was brought up elsewhere in this thread by patio11, and so I'll take a bit of latitude to say now that Japanese salaryman culture, and for that matter the bad facsimile of salaryman culture that American corporations seem to have adopted, is an extremely toxic environment for getting software written -- neverminding all the other things it is extremely toxic. It is a culture built on defensiveness and evasion of even the faintest whiff of responsibility for anything that requires any sort of discretion.

I think that it is this culture that is the fundamental problem, and that we keep trying to cure the disease by treating the symptoms. Salaryman culture doesn't even work perfectly for manufacturing, where there is literally no discretion amongst the rank-and-file. Things still go badly: the car still has brakes that fail, the toy still contains toxic amounts of lead, the plant still leaked toxins into the river nearby. How the hell do we expect it to work for something as obviously based on almost continuous acts of discretion like software development? This culture is broken, and we need to stop tacitly accepting that brokenness is inevitable and perpetual.

Or have we just decided the cultural battle is lost, and that we have to settle with whatever symbolic victories we can get to get through the day?

[1] The idea of Bad Agile is discussed more here: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html

There is more to the cost of airing a pilot than just the production cost of the pilot, and this even assumes the network has agreed to assume the cost of that.

There is the cost of lining up advertisers for the commercial breaks during, before, and after the pilot.

There is the displacement of the show(s) that would've otherwise filled the time-slot the pilot occupies.

There is the opportunity cost of the advertisers you might have lined up if you hadn't punted the incumbent for the pilot.

The more pilots you elect to air, the more often you have to make these trade-offs. If there are a sufficient number of incumbents that can be thoughtlessly traded for pilots like this, I'd wonder about the general program management of the network, and how long they've been allowing things to stagnate.

Even if you just sacrificed a week, that is a huge amount of potential revenue to sacrifice for the sake of picking the "right" set of shows.

And, even if all the economics for airing every pilot works out, it still doesn't guarantee much. You are still gathering data based on what people say they might want to watch based on a snapshot. I can't imagine this is going to be particularly predictive of a series's performance. This seems similar to someone taking a vote on whether a movie sequel ought to be produced from an audience who had just seen the original; I can see far more people asking for that many Scary Movie sequels as actually went to see them.

However, targeting certain demographics by way of traditional advertising, like paying to interrupt everyone watching a broadcast television station, can suck as bad or worse, depending on the demographic.

As far as I can think of, it comes down to a couple of decisions: how much do you believe the medium, and not just the content, is going to affect the number of hits you get; and, how much is the feedback data you gather from your medium going to help your advertising campaign become more successful. There may be fewer people on Hulu, but your television does not provide a "thumbs-up" button at a per advertisement granularity.

So, while I think that the metrics would be bogus for trying to get a representative sample of a collective demographic who might watch motion video on any medium, I also don't think there is no worthwhile demographic information to be gleaned from posting one's media content on Hulu. It feels like a game of tradeoffs, and one you can probably only make an informed decision on by doing test runs, and seeing what data comes back.

Hopefully, this doesn't seem too pedantic; I just thought your assertion was too broad.

For those of you who applied, but were turned down, you should apply to future events until you get an invite. And as soon as you do, try as hard as you can to attend.

The event is seriously worth it -- even if you have to travel from some distance away, like I did. The chance to interact with the YC founders, and realize that they are really far more down to earth than our imaginations might make them seem -- ok, maybe just my imagination--, is really enlightening.

I'll admit that my doubts made me seriously contemplate not applying; against all the giants I would be competing against for an invite, what chance did I have. I imagine it is reasonably similar to the sort of doubt potential founders feel when they think about submitting an application to a YC funding round; the competition is bound to be insurmountable anyway, so why bother. That I have a reputation amongst my friends for being pretty self-confident makes me wonder just how severe of a roadblock this can be for most people against themselves, before anyone else even has a chance to weigh in. Either friends are wrong about me, or this is a legitimately huge impediment.

My thoughts eventually boiled down to this: what do I have to lose? Pride and dignity, maybe, but only if I let that happen. So I applied, against what doubts I still had.

Of course, all of the above advice is predicated on YC holding more of these events, which I sincerely hope they do. I'm sure there are many more people who would greatly benefit from being able to attend, and I'm at least reasonably sure the YC founder crowd would benefit considerably in meeting more potential employees at another event like this.

There are ridiculous inefficiencies, but they exist do to some completely screwed up assumptions people make, or that they just blindly follow out of deference to common wisdom.

In order for someone to make money solving these problems, they'd need to convince the parties involved that their assumptions are incorrect, and that they need to use a new approach to hiring. For instance, a hiring manager who believes that the clerk they are seeking must have a bachelors degree, n+ years of experience, and whatever else. Why; because this person has a large number of assumptions they are working off of, and each of these requirements is a manifestation of some subset of those assumptions. And, in the case of the companies tied to this article, they have to already be employed.

Changing these assumptions is amazingly hard to do, because their existence represents a cultural problem, not a knowledge problem. This would be like a company trying to make money solving racism when most everyone in society is a racist. It is incredibly hard to do; people will go bankrupt rather than give up what they've believed all their lives.

I'm reminded a number of months ago of a post you made in reply to one of mine where you discussed the cultural implications of quitting a permanent salaryman position in Japan; you pointed out that anyone who does this will likely never find themselves as more than a contractor ever again. This is really just a different manifestation of the same basic cultural bias; if you are unemployed, our cultural mores dictate that this should reflect badly upon you. If there is a solution to this problem here, I think it would have to look similar to the solution to Japan's bias toward unemployed salarymen.

But, I could be wrong about this; in fact, I'd like to be wrong. It would provide me additional faith in the resiliency of humanity. I just can't see us being that ruthlessly introspective without something far more horrible than high unemployment to motivate us.

People who screen resumes tend to assume that you are unemployed because of one or more other undesirable traits you have, like a tendency to be irresponsible or violent and antisocial. This assumption is a mix of broken societal wisdom and an association fallacy. FWIW, there's another fallacy committed when they themselves become unemployed; everyone else unemployed is a antisocial lunatic, but they are a good person who has simply fallen on rough times -- total cognitive dissonance, but they don't notice, even when it is pointed out to them.

It is not necessarily true that a company that is employing this philosophy is necessarily cutting out the best from it's hiring pool; but the inverse isn't necessarily true either. My suspicion is that the mean quality of the unemployed applicants to a company might be slightly worse than the employed applicants, but not enough so to represent anything significant.

What I can more confidently say is true is that most companies, and for that matter most individuals, haven't thought about this at all. What we do right now is the default, and they haven't yet been fired for relying on it, nor have they been rewarded for not doing so. Until they are, nothing will change.

Graduated benefit reduction might prevent the moral hazard, but it does so at the expense of introducing all sorts of assumptions about the availability of work, and the likelihood of getting an offer and becoming reemployed again quickly.

In fact, it may have a non-linear detrimental effect, because people who end up unemployed long-term will come to depend more on UI as more and more of their savings dry up. It stops being effective just about the time they need it to be effective.

The UI system inherently sucks because of this; either people will game it, or it will be eroded too severely to be of any real use during really tough economic times.

As an aside, to help my own thinking about this, how much does the average employer contribute per employee to UI benefits? This is really open-ended on purpose, I'm just kind of looking for ballpark numbers, from as many contexts as people are willing to offer them. :-)

I think the ultimate claim is that if you create a system that can potentially be gamed, people will find whatever way they can to game it. It is possible also that they will game it incorrectly.

To cement your suggestion: yes, there are poor women that do this. Making the existence of such actions unspeakable trades solving the problem for perpetuating a socially acceptable lie about it. I don't see how this is better.

And the other socially disadvantaged will game systems built for their benefit as well. People don't suddenly grow a heart and a conscience and become flawlessly altruistic because they were a victim of something. It is just a possible they develop the opposite attitude: society screwed then, and now they're going to return the favor. Will they necessarily? No.

But I'm not going to give the benefit of the doubt just because they'd claim to be a victim of something. I don't know if they've actually been a victim; they may have foist this upon themselves, in which case I am contributing to massive amounts of moral hazard. They may be down on their luck, but think that the current system we have for dealing with that sucks, because it incentivizes the wrong things and treats them as more of a victim than they think it should. For what it is worth, I am in that latter bucket right now. The entire UI system and such is just so condescendingly paternalistic; I feel like I've suddenly become a grade school student again.

They may have been a victim, but we also don't presume that someone was a victim of assault just because they are bruised. We don't hand them whatever entitlement they think we, in due guilt-worthy acquiescent behavior, owe them as penance. And we certainly don't make speaking about the self-inflicted ways one might become bruised taboo.

It's just not that simple. You can't assume that everyone who is disadvantaged is a hapless and wholly undeserving victim of horrible circumstances; there's just too much in that assumption that can be wrong, and being wrong means you make the real problems worse.

If I pull a potato out of my backyard garden, bake it, and then chow down, what part of that has been refined? There's as much fiber in a russet potato than there is in a half-cup of brown rice.

It might be that the cause of diabetes is glucose level spikes and therefore insulin spikes; the video that was posted here last month with the Robert Lustig from UCSF talking suggested it actually something other than insulin that contributed insulin-resistance -- free fatty acids precipitated by the liver. It's not as simple as saying this thing that has spikey behavior is going to become ignored by the body if it keeps spiking. Things that seem analogous aren't always, as much as it would make knowing good from bad so much easier to distinguish.

I won't tell you it's bad for you, but I'll tell you with a pretty damn high amount of certainty something else: both and I and you don't know it is bad for you.

Might there be a risk? Sure. But then we've spent the last thirty years believing something else, saturated fats, were more of a risk than they now appear to be. It might be possible that we are leaping too quickly from possibly correlative to sufficiently causal yet again.

There's a lot in common between the saturated fats craze of the preceding few decades, and the fervor of our new dietary crusades today. I'm not convinced that we've learned a damn thing from that experience, and thus worry we are destining ourselves to looking back on this craze the same way in 30 years. Biochemistry and metabolism just aren't that simple; making it artificially simple doesn't do crap.